I designed a very basic website for my dad about his book. Using basic php I have coded menus and a basic counter script, I don't know if this has affected my problem in any way.

I also have recently upgraded from a windows server to a linux server.

The background color is supposed to be black

In internet explorer, my website has a WHITE background, but if you refresh, it goes BLACK

Whereas in Firefox it shows the correct black background with no refresh needed.

http://www.gks.uk.com

Could you please test this, and if you're having the same problem as me, perhaps try and suggest why this is happening.


EDIT: Using browsershots.org, it shows it as a black background. Does this mean its just my IP address?

Example image: http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x...15/whitebg.jpg

Came up black for me in IE6.

Get rid of those horrid <font> tags... and validate your code, you've got a batch of errors.

The problem was that the DOCTYPE was slightly out of place

Uh huh.. ANYTHING above the doctype line, even a space, will throw IE into quirks mode.

Why is IE so bad? lol

Uh.. because it's from Microsoft ?? Because they thought they owned the browser market and could go their own way. Because they rested on their laurels for so many years and did NOTHING to fix the problems with IE 6 !